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Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Lena Dunham, Emily Blunt, and numerous other celebrities, along with former sex workers and victims of sex trafficking and women’s rights advocates, have signed a letter from the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) criticizing a policy currently under discussion within Amnesty International. The policy, which Amnesty plans to introduce at a meeting in Dublin in August, promotes decriminalization of sex work to protect sex workers’ rights, health, and safety. The policy says (in part):

This policy has been developed in recognition of the high rates of human rights abuses and violations that sex workers experience globally. This document identifies the most prominent barriers to the realization of sex workers’ rights and underlines state obligations to address them. This policy should not be considered in isolation from Amnesty International’s existing human rights policies and positions. All of Amnesty’s positions, including those on gender equality, violence against women, non-discrimination, human trafficking, sexual and reproductive rights, access to justice, rights to and at work and the right to adequate housing, apply equally to sex workers as to any other individuals facing human rights abuses. In fighting for the full realisation of sex workers’ rights Amnesty International must both acknowledge and prioritise the issues raised in this document and mainstream the rights of sex workers into other relevant areas of work.

This policy reflects a growing body of research from UN agencies, human rights organisations and social science which indicates that criminalisation, in its varying forms, exposes sex workers to increased risk of human rights abuses. The policy is based on principles of harm reduction and the human rights principles of physical integrity and autonomy.

The policy does not change Amnesty International’s longstanding position that forced labour and human trafficking (including for the purposes of sexual exploitation) constitute serious human rights abuses and must be criminalised. Under international law, states have a range of obligations to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children.

The letter, endorsed by the aforementioned celebrities (who, while not the sole signers, are drawing the most attention), former sex workers and trafficking victims, advocates, and religious and secular organizations, criticizes Amnesty’s proposed policy, saying that decriminalization of sex work results in more, not less, harm to women and will create a “gender apartheid” in which one class of women enjoys the benefits of protection and another class suffers increased abuse. The letter says (in part):

The signatories below represent a wide breadth of national and international human rights advocates, women’s rights organizations, faith-based and secular organizations and concerned individuals, deeply troubled by Amnesty’s proposal to adopt a policy that calls for decriminalization of pimps, brothel owners and buyers of sex — the pillars of a $99 billion global sex industry. Most importantly, the signers include courageous survivors of the sex trade whose authority of experience informs us about the inescapable harms the sex trade inflicted on them and guides us toward finding meaningful solutions toward ending these human rights violations.

[…]

We firmly believe and agree with Amnesty that human beings bought and sold in the sex trade, who are mostly women, must not be criminalized in any jurisdiction and that their human rights must be respected and protected to the fullest extent. We also agree that, with the exception of a few countries, governments and law enforcement grievously violate prostituted individuals’ human rights. However, what your “Draft Policy on Sex Work” is incomprehensibly proposing is the wholesale decriminalization off the sex industry, which in effect legalizes pimping, brothel owning and sex buying.

So that’s what they said. (In part.)

As a comfortably well-off, straight, cis, white woman working a 9-to-5 office job in the Deep South, I have no personal knowledge or experience whatsoever in this area. I can’t speak on the issue any more educatedly than, say, Anne Hathaway. Because of that, it’s my job not to speak but to listen to others who do have knowledge and experience.

Many signers of CATW’s letter have that personal knowledge and experience — the former victims of sex trafficking know how bad it can get, and those horrible lived experiences have compelled to speak out, saying that criminalizing sex work is the only way to keep vulnerable people safe. Many other current and former sex workers argue that keeping sex workers safe, preventing trafficking, and enabling both victims of trafficking and voluntary sex workers to leave freely can only happen working within a decriminalized system of laws and regulations. Groups like the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, the Sex Workers Outreach Project, and individuals who frequently remain nameless for understandable reasons have said that the stigma behind sex work and the lack of state protection have made life worse, not better; more dangerous, not safer; and sex work harder, not easier, to get out of for those who want to.

When Cambodia closed its brothels in 2008 to curb human trafficking, it didn’t end the sex trade, but it did separate workers from health screenings and services — at which point a group of current and former sex workers organized in a volunteer organization to serve those needs. In India, the DMSC organized to eliminate human trafficking and women being forced into sex work, and to rehabilitate women who have been rescued from those circumstances, because the government’s laws and interventions weren’t effective enough. In 2010, a former sex worker and a sex-worker rights advocate spoke to the UN against criminalization in the U.S. on the basis that it leaves sex workers without resources and vulnerable to abuse and violence — including at the hands of the police. In those examples, all criminalizing sex work did was free the governments of social service obligations and leave sex workers and victims of trafficking to fend for themselves. In those environments, it’s current and former sex workers who have had to protect each other, provide services for each other, and help free workers from slavery when no one else is helping.

And the voices, while all valid, don’t always agree, and there’s endless nuance to the issue. CATW’s letter refers to “pimps and brothel owners” as abusers who will continue to profit from still-illegal practices (like trafficking and torture) in a decriminalized environment; many sex workers report being arrested for living in the same apartment or forming their own brothels for safety and protection. CATW’s letter refers to the effects of deregulation (although Amnesty’s policy focuses on decriminalization, which is different) in Germany; many sex workers refer to the positive effects of decriminalization in New Zealand. CATW’s letter mentions the serious long-term physical and psychological harm suffered by trafficked individuals; many sex workers talk about not having access to care when they’re forced underground.

Categories like “trafficked person” and “sex worker” encompass everything from the cam girl at Harvard working for a little bit of drinking money to the six-year-old Ukrainian girl in the back of a truck bound for Amsterdam. And that’s what makes this issue so much bigger than a letter. There’s no looking at a ten-year-old boy in a brothel in Bangkok, a 30-year-old black transgender woman on a street corner in Chicago, and a 20-year-old white woman shooting a poorly produced porno in Burbank, and saying, “All of those people need the same thing.” Boiling it down to names on a petition is like asking Miss Nevada to solve racism in 30 seconds or less — if it were that simple, this would have been solved a long time ago. And I’m not criticizing anyone, Meryl Streep included, for signing what appears to be a very compelling letter. It’s just that for my part, in my position, I feel like there’s so much more to read on the subject than to write.

The current cover of New York magazine is significant not just for who’s there — 35 of the women who have accused Bill Cosby of rape — but for who isn’t there — victims of sexual assault who are afraid or ashamed to come forward. Those individuals are represented by an empty chair, including those unspeaking individuals in the “unwelcome sisterhood” of Cosby’s alleged* victims.

But social media discussion surrounding #TheEmptyChair addresses not just those unspoken victims but all victims of sexual assault who feel compelled to stay silent, and the cultural and societal pressures that keep them silent.

#TheEmptyChair is a chair I've sat in- for all of my adolescence I sat in it for fear of not being believed, or loved, because of it.

Cosby has never been charged with sexual assault and publicly denies the allegations, although in recently unsealed testimony from a 2005 civil trial for his assault of Andrea Constand, he acknowledges that he did, in fact, procure and deploy drugs for the purpose of raping (“having sex with”) women.

The accusers themselves tell their stories — both their experiences with Cosby, and their treatment by the media and society in general — to New York.

[Content note: a topic that’s been discussed to hell and back and yet is being discussed back to hell again because this is my blog and I get to]

It’s happened again. Again. It’s always going to happen, and it’s always going to spur debate: A couple brought a kid to a restaurant, the kid was noisy, there was an exchange of some level of vehemence between the restaurant owner and the parents, and everyone has flipped out. The specifics? Here are the specifics, but it doesn’t really matter, in the end, because no matter the incident, public reactions are always the same: Kids shouldn’t be in public! No, kids should be everywhere! No, kids should be in some places, and now I will list those places! No, kids should be in all places except for the ones I’m about to list! We can all agree that kids suck though, right? No, you suck! I don’t think kids suck, I just don’t like them. How can you say that you don’t like a group of people?! Etc. ad nauseam. Much interesting. Such novel. So notdonetodeath at Feministealready.

To end the debate once and for all, I have taken it upon my (entirely unqualified, self-satisfied) self to compose a comprehensive, binding list of Official Rules for Everyone When Kids Are Out in the World.

Rules for Diners

1. Kids are people. They’re very short people, and they’re people whose brains haven’t finished developing, and they’re people who haven’t entirely learned how to People yet, but they’re people. You don’t get to live in a world free of a particular kind of person. It might be cool, in some certain cases — I would love to live in a world where no one ever wants a car horn that plays “Dixie” — but, in the words of the prophet, you can’t always get what you want.

2. As not-entirely-trained people, kids need the experience of being out in public in order to learn how to People. This is probably, on occasion, going to involve a restaurant that you like. A kid isn’t going to learn how to behave at Applebee’s if they never eat anywhere but McDonald’s. So recognize that, to a reasonable extent, the fussiness you encounter is in the service of having not-fussy dining experiences with this person in the future. Cut them some slack.

3. Have some compassion for parents. (I say “parents,” and I do mean both parents, but who takes the vast majority of the shit when a kid acts up in public? Mom. So especially have some compassion for Mom.) You think it’s bad hearing a screaming baby? Try sitting in the echo chamber that is a vinyl-padded booth with the cuddly little noisemaker. Yes, sometimes parents ignore squalling kids because they want to pretend it isn’t happening, and sometimes they let kids run around and/or make messes because they can’t be bothered to intervene or because, God help me, they think it’s cute. This is not all parents. This is not even most parents. You don’t know if they’re dealing with a kid who wants attention or a kid who has Tourette’s, so don’t give them the immediate shit-eye just because you think they should be able to instantly silence their unhappy child through sheer force of will. Also, don’t start giving them the shit-eye the moment they walk through the door with a kid. You have no way of knowing whether or not the kid is going to be disruptive; for all you know, the kid could be better behaved than you.

4. If you’re going to get pissy about a child’s behavior in a restaurant, yours had better be on freaking point the entire time. You’d better take your cell phone conversations outside, use your Inside Voice, keep your crumbs on the table, and be polite to the waiter. No demanding perfect behavior from a kid if you’re not going to do much better. At least the kid has the excuse that they’re not experienced at being a person yet; you’re supposed to have mastered it by now.

5. Do not, under any circumstances, gripe if you see a parent pulling out a coloring book, an iPad, and/or a bag of Cheerios for their kid. You know what’s happening there? A child is being made happy. And when the child is happy and entertained, your evening is better. You want to demand that a child be quiet and entertained and then gripe about the way it’s done? Really? Go eat at home.

6. Don’t dump someone in a restaurant. Okay, this one has nothing to do with kids, but seriously — I once had a guy take me to a restaurant to break up with me because he figured I’d be less likely to make a noisy scene in public. He was right, because I’m cool, but everyone isn’t as cool as me, and if you want to make an adult have a toddler-style sobbing fit, end a four-year relationship in a room full of strangers and steak.

Rules for Parents

1. If your kid is fussy and can’t be un-fussed within a couple of minutes or so, remove them. Take them to a bathroom, a sidewalk, sit in the car with them for a few minutes, whatever’s convenient (recognizing that nothing is ever actually convenient when you’re dealing with young kids). Bring them back when they’re once again non-fussy. Kids get fussy — it happens. But you’ve signed up to deal with the fuss; your fellow diners haven’t.

2. If you want a night off when you don’t have to actively parent, get a babysitter. Don’t take your kids to a restaurant and let them run all over the place because you want a little bit of Me/Us Time. Running around is for a PlayPlace; sitting quietly (or at least not running around and not kicking people’s seats) is for a grownup restaurant. If your kid doesn’t have enough experience with nicer restaurants — or bars, or hipster coffee shops, or whatever — to be able to follow social norms, you’re not chained to your house, but you are on the clock supervising them and helping them behave appropriately for the setting.

3. You do what you need to do (within reason, of course) to keep your kids occupied and happy. Video games and iPads are perfectly acceptable ways of doing that — with headphones. Diners aren’t complaining about the sounds of squalling kids because they’d rather hear the dulcet tones of Juno’s Piano.

4. If you’re asked to remove your child until they’ve calmed down, do so. It sucks, and it might not be fair, but do it. Even voice your displeasure, calmly and at a low volume, with the manager while you do it, if that’s what you’re feeling, but do it. You can shit-talk that restaurant owner at length later, you can make an angry phone call, you can tear them apart on social media and let Yelp know that the restaurant isn’t! Child! Friendly! and should be boycotted, but again: Everyone wants a pleasant dining environment, and your screaming fit isn’t part of that, any more than your kid’s was.

5. The behavioral standards for kids in a restaurant are the same as the standards for adults in that same restaurant. No shouting. No running around. No spilling food on the floor. No taking food from other people’s plates. No coloring on the walls. No tripping waiters carrying heavy trays. There’s no letting it pass just because they’re a kid — they’re either meeting standards, or they’re learning to meet standards.

6. Your kid is not a person with a disability (exception: kids who have disabilities); they’re a person who hasn’t learned to Person yet. Saying, “What if a deaf person was in here talking really loudly?” as a reason not to teach your kid to modify their volume is not on. A person who can’t help engaging in some non-societally-sanctioned behavior, and one who is able to and is in the process of learning not to do that? Those are two different kinds of people. Think about what you’re saying here: “An autistic person having a negative reaction to the stimuli in their environment is the exact same thing as my kid flipping out because their iPad died, so I’m just going to sit here and finish my cocktail.”

7. As great as it would be, you can’t expect the people around you to automatically help out. It seriously would be nice if we all lived in that kind of a society, and some of us actually do, but it’s not universal. Messages are mixed: Sometimes, we get yelled at for not helping out in some nonspecific way when a kid is upset. Sometimes, we get yelled at for trying to help, because we’re never supposed to speak to or make eye contact with someone else’s kid. Sometimes, the safest thing is to just not engage. If you need help, say so out loud, and chances are there will be someone around willing to help you out. (Be sure to thank them.)

Rules for Restaurant Owners

1. As a restaurateur, you have the responsibility for providing a dining experience that’s pleasant for your guests. That almost always, in a non-Chuck E. Cheese environment, doesn’t include kid-type noisiness. The parent of a noisy kid is a paying customer — as are all of your other paying customers. If someone was talking on a cell phone or playing music loudly, you’d speak to them about being quieter (or should, at least; see Rule 2). Do everyone the courtesy of speaking — politely — to the parent of the noisy chid. And when your staff does it, back them up and don’t throw them under the bus just to appease the customer.

2. Hold adults and kids to the same standards. If your restaurant is quiet enough that a loud-talking toddler is ruining the mood, then be sure to also address the guy talking on his cell phone at the same volume. If your pub is so noisy that the drunks have to yell over each other to be heard, it’s likely that no one will notice a crying kid anyway, except to wonder why the baby is in a loud bar and why their bottle appears to be full of Guinness.

3. Have a coloring page and a handful of crayons, or something, to hand to kids. Seriously, if you have high chairs, you should have something to entertain the kids who sit in them. Maybe it detracts from your image as a super-high-class eatery, but it also improves your chances of having a super-high-class ambiance, and that’s really what matters. Bonus: You get parents saying, “They even had crayons for my kid! They’re so thoughtful,” and if you have to speak with parents about noise, you can say, “Listen, we tried to entertain your kid. What else are we supposed to do?”

4. Be polite. I mean, seriously. I’ve got friends in service, I’ve got friends in restaurants, I’ve worked in customer service, and I know how much of a pain it can be to take customers’ shit and not get to retaliate. Unfortunately, that’s part of the deal. You have the authority, in your own restaurant, to ask a parent to quiet a noisy kid or even, under extreme circumstances, to compel them to leave. Do so calmly and respectfully — even if you don’t feel they deserve your respect. Then go back to your office, close the door, and scream and knock over a chair or something. Think of it this way: You deal politely with the parent of a squalling kid, and you’re the hero who preserved the pleasant dining experience. You get into a shouting match with said parent, and now you’re just contributing to an environment that’s way more unpleasant than one crying kid.

5. Ideally, everyone taking part in the exchange will be a grownup (with the exception, of course, of the kid). But if there’s only one person there who’s going to be a grownup? That’s you. This calls back to Rule 4: Don’t be insulting, don’t be passive aggressive, don’t try to hit back on social media. Calmly explain your side of things when the opportunity arises, no matter how much you want to call someone obscene, all-caps names on Facebook. And then go back to your office and knock over another chair.

The Biggest Rule for Everyone

Remember that at the center of this is a small person who is, at best, semi-responsible for the way they interact with the world. Be a good model for that small person of how a responsible, sensible, compassionate human being behaves. On a plane, realize that the baby doesn’t know how to pop their ears and doesn’t exactly want to cry, and be a little sympathetic. In a restaurant, recognize that your kid might be crying because they’re really, really uncomfortable or unhappy and that the kind thing to do would be to take them home. Remember that the world doesn’t revolve around you — the diner who feels entitled to a silent meal; the parent who wants to go wherever, whenever, under whatever circumstances at all; or even, for that matter, the baby, who is one of 630 million like it in the world and is definitely more important to you than to anyone else around you. You don’t have to be a saint, or a martyr, or some kind of other religious imagery implying patience, since I seem to be on a roll here. Just… don’t be an asshole.

Whether one believes the friend zone is real or not, today’s dating advice should have a positive effect on anyone’s love life. In this week’s episode, we even try to shoot for a bit more maturity, which you can judge in the transcript below…

PROBLEM
▼
according to society, being friends without “benefits” is a purgatory known as the “friend zone”.
lately one geek asked our advice on avoiding this friend zone, when meeting girls he’d like to date.

SOLUTION
▼
at our weekly LAN party, we formulated 5 tips for geeks at risk of such poorly requited love.

JENNIFER H.
▼
“have you been friend-zoned by friends you’ve known for ages? you’re better off with trying strangers.”
“old friends are too accustomed to you as a friend. you should have flirted more from the beginning.”
“next time you meet someone you like, send signals to show you’re open to a relationship. no pressure.”

CIARA M.
▼
“have a nice, friendly personality. contrary to popular belief, most normal women don’t prefer jerks.”
“however, being nice isn’t enough. no one likes guys who act like they’re owed sex for being nice.”
“attractive folks are likeable and admirable. be a good person first, if you’re trying to get laid.”

BRYNNE C.
▼
“being friend-zoned doesn’t mean you’re unattractive. it simply means you’re not her type.”
“it’s politeness, really. she’s friend-zoning you to protect your ego, by not openly rejecting you.”
“it’s not a sign to try harder. avoid pestering her unless you want to look like a predatory plonker.”

KATRINA R.
▼
“i’ve read online that you can dress your way out of the friend zone. that’s so unbelievably stupid.”
“no one’s friend-zoning you over how you dress. well-dressed jerks are still jerks on the outside.”
“if you keep being friend-zoned, maybe your personality needs more work, not your pants.”

MELISSA A.
▼
“to avoid friend-zoning, be honest with yourself. are you really interesting enough to date?”
“if you’re dateable, potential mates will gravitate to you. stop looking all the darn time.”
“in the end, just be the best person you can be. romance and stuff will follow, when you’re ready.”

Have your own suggestions? Post away in the comments.

We’ll do two more of these episodes this summer, for a limited 5-part run – after which we’ll start analysing lessons learned from this project, so we can apply them to our winter project of feminist game reviews. But during the interim downtime, we might allow our younger creatives to try their own ideas around here this summer.

A new ban, passed in May and signed into law by outgoing president Goodluck Jonathan, outlaws female genital mutilation in Nigeria. The practice was banned worldwide by the U.N. in 2012 and already outlawed in several states within Nigeria, but the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 represents a nationwide commitment to the ban. The new law also outlaws abandonment of spouse and/or dependents without financial support.

“This is fantastic news and a landmark moment. We are now one step closer to ending this harmful practice,” said UK international development secretary Justine Greening.

As the most populous country in Africa, Nigeria’s decision carries significant weight, but it would need to be implemented effectively, said Mary Wandia, FGM programme manager of Equality Now. “With such a huge population, Nigeria’s vote in favour of women and girls is hugely important,” she said. “We hope, too, that the other African countries which have yet to ban FGM — including Liberia, Sudan and Mali, among others — do so immediately to give all girls a basic level of protection.”

Others stressed that the battle to end FGM in a generation was far from over, saying it was crucial that attitudes, as well as laws, were changed.

“It is crucial that we scale up efforts to change traditional cultural views that underpin violence against women. Only then will this harmful practice be eliminated,” said Stella Mukasa, director of gender, violence and rights at the International Center for Research on Women, writing in the Guardian.

While passing the law at all is significant and makes a clear statement about the government’s official position on FGM, the biggest steps remain enforcing the law and changing societal attitudes that lead to the procedure in the first place. While a 2013 study by UNICEF set Nigeria’s overall prevalence of FGM at 27 percent — moderately low among African nations that still practice it — a 2012 study showed a prevalence as high as 76 percent in some regions of the country, largely for reasons of traditional practice, superstition, and controlling a girl’s/woman’s sexuality — all attitudes that can be hard to change through health education or application of law in areas where law enforcement is inconsistent. According to the study, community-led efforts tended to be the most successful in reducing or eliminating FGM in an area — particularly efforts led by women who have been victims of FGM themselves and refuse to subject their daughters to such a terrible practice. According to UNICEF, 62 percent of Nigerian girls and women say that FGM should end, and now they have their government’s support in making it happen. Officially, at least.

Rainbow Day was supposed to be a day to show school spirit — a day when each class would wear a color, and they’d all stand in lines to make a rainbow and take a picture of the rainbow, and it was going to be awesome. Not, like, a gay rainbow or anything — rainbows aren’t just for gay pride, they’re also for heavenly covenants and leprechauns and middle-school teachers who owned way too many Lisa Frank school supplies as a kid. The only thing standing in the teacher’s way: four Muslim girls in her class who showed up for Rainbow Day in black hijabs and not the purple clothes they’d been assigned.

I felt sick. Putting them to the side would get them more attention. Sending them indoors would leave them unsupervised. So I let them stay put. I hoped desperately that they would change their minds and smile along with the whole school.

Later, I saw the photo. They had covered their faces.

That night, I cried with surprising vehemence. Was this adolescent rebellion, or had their parents put them up to it? Was it as homophobic as it appeared?

In the end, the rainbow was Photoshopped free of black figures and hung in the hall. The four girls got a stern lecture from the principal. They mumbled excuses about the wind. Calling their parents seemed pointless.

I sat the girls down in my classroom at lunch days later and explained that my idea of a rainbow included them, too. I said I was hurt that they hadn’t come to me with their concerns. Three girls looked down and shifted uncomfortably. Basma smirked. Nonetheless, our talk ended there.

[…]

Every time the girls wore purple clothing afterward (even Basma did), it stung. Upon reflection, I believe the girls’ rejection of Rainbow Day released my long-buried feelings as a friendless 10-year-old. Daydreaming about rainbows had blunted the blows of my bullies. These Muslim girls’ actions had revealed a chink in my rainbow armour.

Happy Rainbow Day! Let us celebrate diversity and inclusiveness by ‘shopping girls out of our class picture for not conforming.

Comments on our 28th #spillover thread have closed, so it’s time for a new one. Some reminders:

#spillover is part of our comment moderation system for keeping other threads on-topic. It is intended as a constructive space for tangential discussions which are veering off-topic on other threads. This is part of our blog netiquette, which has the general goal of making it as simple as possible for commenters to find discussions focussed on topics of particular interest without entirely stifling worthwhile tangents of sorta-related or general interest. #spillover is also a space for those ongoing/endless disagreements and 101 issues that just keep on popping up.

Commenters are encouraged to respect the topic of each post and be proactive regarding inevitable thread-drift in long threads: we hope that commenters will cheerfully volunteer to take off-topic responses into #spillover so that each post’s discussion gets room to breathe and tangents can be indulged in a room of their own.

[Content note for Fifty Shades of Grey-type consent issues and general awfulness]

In a bid to wring every last cent out of the “Fifty Shades” phenomenon, author E.L. James has released Grey, the story of Fifty Shades of Grey as told from Christian Grey’s perspective. Some readers, both fans of the series and critics, were curious about Christian’s thought process during the original books, since the story we see from Ana’s point of view was so deeply creepy that dear God, there had to be something, something, something redeeming in the backstory to make it more of an edgy, kinky romance and less of an episode of Law & Order: SVU with a private helicopter.

Well, the votes are in, and it’s official: Christian Grey really is a serial killer. Or at least he’s going to be; it’s just a matter of time. We don’t get a smidgen of self-awareness, or consequences for his actions, or the impact of his molestation at 15 by a friend of his mother, or an examination of his childhood trauma outside of the periodic flashback. I’m assuming the flashbacks are meant to make him sympathetic and explain his own abusive behavior toward Anastasia, and possibly take an edge off of the creepiness that defies description and makes Fifty Shades of Grey look like Hop on Pop. It succeeds at neither of those things.

The first-person narration, particularly the inner monologue (which is pretty much the lovechild of that guy at the bar who think he’s clever because he can spin everything into a dick joke, and Ryan Phillippe trying to sound slick in Cruel Intentions), eliminates any ambiguity that the Fifty Shades story might be anything other than gross. The stalkiness? Extra stalky when you know exactly how far he went with his background check and GPS tracking. The weird initial interview? Painfully weird when you know that he had a boner the entire time and wanted to “refine her motor skills with the aid of a riding crop.” The creepy scene at the hardware store? So much creepier when you know that while he’s buying rope and cable ties, he’s thinking, “Maybe I’ll find the delectable Miss Steele and have some fun,” and, “Oh, this is going to be fun. You’ll be amazed at what I can do with a few cable ties, baby.”

(All of that notwithstanding, it’s really not that interesting a book — a dead-boring tale of love, lust, BDSM, and a billionaire’s tortured soul. Even the detailed, yet flat and clinical, sex scenes leave you longing for the erotic energy of Ana saying “Argh!” when she gets devirginated.)

The one thing that Grey really has to its credit is that it doesn’t seem nearly the endorsement and romanticization of domestic abuse that Fifty Shades of Grey was. Rather than “Christian is abusive because he loves me so much,” the message we get from Grey (whether James intended it or not) is “Christian is a dangerous person with the power to impose his twisted views on sex and relationships on anyone without consequence, and he should be avoided at all costs.” I honestly can’t see anyone exposed to his inner thoughts thinking, “Now there’s a man I trust to tie me up and blindfold me. Where do I find a guy like that to stick peeled ginger up my butt?” While part of me feels that no one should subject themselves to the pain of reading Grey, another part feels that it should be required reading before picking up the original trilogy. It would change the story entirely.

Because Christian is so much worse than one could have feared just from reading the Fifty Shades books. It’s so bad, y’all.

One upside: For all of her ongoing, willful ignorance of BDSM, James does appear to have spent some time googling the names of expensive things in the hopes of making her super-rich protagonist comes across as super-rich. So if you want to start a drinking game around every time he name-drops Pouilly-Fume, black cod, Bollinger, Gulfstreams, Gaggias, and catamarans, you may get drunk enough to read this book. (Might I recommend a screw-cap bottle of grocery store Chardonnay with a Silly Straw in it.) Final review: gaaah stars out of eeesh.

Excerpts to ruin your day:

“She’s oil on my troubled, deep, dark waters.”

“I’m confused. I want to spank her. But she’s said no.”

“I ask, ‘Are you hungry?’ ‘Not for food,’ she teases. Whoa. She might as well be addressing my groin.”

“She has a fine, fine ass. And I’m going to make it pink… like the champagne.”

“Her sharp intake of breath is music to my dick.”

“In my closet I strip off all my clothes and from a drawer pull out my favorite jeans. My DJs. Dom jeans.”

“That girl provokes me like no one has before. And she’s pissed at me; maybe she has PMS.”

In a 2005 deposition for his first sexual assault case, brought by Andrea Constand, Bill Cosby admitted that he did acquire — and deploy — drugs for the purpose of having sex with women.

Cosby, giving sworn testimony in the lawsuit accusing him of sexual assaulting Constand at his home in Pennsylvania in 2004, said he obtained seven quaalude prescriptions in the 1970s. Constand’s lawyer asked if he had kept the sedatives through the 1990s, after they were banned, but was frustrated by objections from Cosby’s attorney.

“When you got the quaaludes, was it in your mind that you were going to use these quaaludes for young women that you wanted to have sex with?” [Constand’s lawyer, Dolores] Troiani asked.

“Yes,” Cosby answered.

“Did you ever give any of these young women the quaaludes without their knowledge?” Troiani asked.

Cosby’s lawyer again objected, leading Troiani to petition the federal judge to force Cosby to cooperate.

Cosby later said he gave Constand three half-pills of Benadryl, although Troiani in the documents voices doubt that was the drug involved.

The efforts Cosby’s attorneys went to to keep him from exposing the number of women he’d given drugs to (the evasive and only technically grammatical “he gave the Quaaludes” being as far as the lawyer was willing to go)

The fact that when he first spoke to Constand and her mother, they just wanted an apology and to know the name of the drug that he’d given Constand, and he was the one who later offered money

His statement that he met one of his accusers backstage, “[he gives] her Quaaludes. [They] then have sex” (whereas Therese Serignese, almost certainly the accuser in question, would be more likely to characterize it as him giving her two unidentified pills and then raping her in a bathroom)

And the fact that he still contends (despite his stated predilection for Quaalude-facilitated sex) that the drug he gave Constand was Benadryl

The AP asked the courts to unseal the documents, despite arguments from Cosby’s lawyers that “his embarrassment at the release of the discovery motions — deposition excerpts about sex, money, health, and marriage — would be severe.” (Whereas the women whose personal lives have been laid bare in an effort to vilify and discredit them obviously didn’t suffer severe embarrassment.)

U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno ultimately unsealed just part of the deposition, saying, “The stark contrast between Bill Cosby, the public moralist and Bill Cosby, the subject of serious allegations concerning improper (and perhaps criminal) conduct is a matter as to which the AP — and by extension the public — has a significant interest.”

More than two dozen women have come forward to accuse Cosby of sexual assault going back to 1965. A statement on Cosby’s website by his lawyers from November of last year (now removed) dismissed the new accusations as “decade-old, discredited allegations against Mr. Cosby,” saying that “[T]he fact that they are being repeated does not make them true.” Shortly thereafter, they clarified in another statement that the aforementioned blanket denial didn’t apply to Constand’s accusation — because, one assumes, they knew the courts had a deposition giving credit to that decade-old allegation, and that Cosby’s reputation as a friendly, fatherly, trustworthy type would be scuttled once and for all with his very own sworn testimony that he was actually a slipping-women-‘ludes-to-make-them-more-rapeable type. But yeah, all of those women are totally lying, and Bill Cosby would never do something so awful. We’ll just stick with that.

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